A Weblog by One Humble Bookman on Topics of Interest to Discerning Readers, Including (Though Not Limited To) Science Fiction, Books, Random Thoughts, Fanciful Family Anecdotes, Publishing, Science Fiction, The Mating Habits of Extinct Waterfowl, The Secret Arts of Marketing, Other Books, Various Attempts at Humor, The Wonders of New Jersey, the Tedious Minutiae of a Boring Life, Science Fiction, No Accounting (For Taste), And Other Weighty Matters.

Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Andrew Wheeler has had a varied career in publishing and related fields. He spent 16 years as a bookclub editor (mostly for the Science Fiction Book Club), and then moved into marketing. He marketed books and related products to accountants for Wiley for eight years, and now works for Thomson Reuters on large online legal products. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day for a year twice. He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame sons (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) at an unspecified location in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely and purely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Perhaps because I just finished writing a post about a book on corpses (Mary Roach's very entertaining Stiff) and perhaps because I saw that someone chose today to land on the version of this meme I did three years ago, I decided to revisit it, and see how different my answers are now from September of 2006:

Total number of tracks: 18,731 -- it was 14,262, which means I've added nearly 4500 songs in less than three years. I have been on a music-buying tear, I guess.

Last Song: "( )" by They Might Be Giants (Then: The Earlier Years, Disc 1) -- this is the conversation between Gloria and her friend about the Kiss Clinic and intellectuals meeting with other intellectuals.

iTunes seems to have changed its alphabetization algorithm in the last three years, because the old version had numbers at the beginning and foreign characters at the end, and it''s quite different now.

Sort by time:

Shortest Song: "Kangaroo -- SFX" by Carl Stalling & the Warner Brothers Orchestra -- 4 seconds (the same -- though iTunes said it was three seconds long in 2006)

Top 10 Most Played Songs:(It's not quite as bad as it was a year ago, when the boys were on a huge Fountains of Wayne kick, but that band currently has seven of the top ten slots, which would make thus list very boring. So I'm going to elide additional songs by the same artist -- any repeat artist -- in the interests of having a more interesting list.)

"Maureen" by Fountains of Wayne -- 66 plays (plus six more Fountains of Wayne songs in the actual top 10)